VisWeek 2011 Day Two

Monday October 24th, 2011:

We start the day off with an incredibly interesting talk about colors, Applying Color Theory to Vis, presented by Theresa-Marie Rhyne, who is a fabulous public speaker with an impressive amount of knowledge regarding the history of color, color theory, color spaces, and their development and evolution over the last few centuries. Through her talk it really made me come to appreciate the rich and interesting history of color, which is far more complicated and deep then I would have ever imagined. Not only is she familiar with the technological aspects of displaying, managing and printing colors, but she is also very knowledgeable about the history of art, painting and artistic movements throughout history and what impacts they have had on color.

If you missed out on her excellent talk, I can direct you to her blog where she has a video of her slides from the talk Applying Color Theory to Vis which she presented at SigGraph 2011.

Aside from the immense amount of information contained within the slides, she adopts the approaches of Tufte’s works with a rigorous approach for providing citations in captions of all the works she presents. I’ve recently been reading Tufte’s books and I appreciate the dedication he has to providing accurate information to sources, citations and details; you will pleasantly find that same dedication in Rhynes’ work too.

Her presentation concluded with a brief explanation of Painting with a Hurricane, the final result is a combination of different colors for different parameters rather than measuring a single parameter and setting its color value. From my understanding, each dimension contributes some value of color, as the hurricane moves, different regions receive different values and the color is assigned accordingly, the end result a beautiful presentation of the data, an excellent example of the intersection of art, science and data visualization.

Although I took as many notes as I possibly could, it is difficult to provide a complete summary. One of the take away messages I got was that color is hard to do right and is ever evolving. The conclusion is, much like writing a research paper, you write, read, re-write, and re-read, choosing a color scheme is much the same. Particularly in that you are never done, just, hopefully, better off then when you started. Then at some point you become content, until you become much better and return to your old works and recognize all the mistakes you have made. Just the same color is, as with many meaningful endeavors, like chess, wine and writing, quick to start, but ultimately taking a lifetime to master.

Useful Points:

Some of the helpful points I was able to gather and will share with you here are:

Complementary colors make great accents for a set of family colors.

Analogous colors make for good similarities for backgrounds.

Adjacent High Contrast Map regions are visually offensive and exhausting to the viewer.

Contrasting colors can make data stick out, ie. purple highlights of important data on a yellow background.

In addition to that, below are some useful tools which she shared with the audience which can be found on the web. As a result of her talk, I re-did the colors of this very site, using Adobe’s Kuler. Nevertheless I imagine over-time I will begin to recognize some of the mistakes that I have made with this, first attempt, at improving and customizing the colors on my site.

Color Designer – A powerful tool for understanding which colors to choose. A number of color spaces, a must see if you spend any time designing something with color.

Adobe’s Kuler – A slightly simpler tool than Color Designer but this time provided by Adobe. Again the user chooses the rule and the tool provides some colors. An easy to use interface allows you to explore a number of color options.

Interactive Visual Text Analytics:

For the latter half of the morning I headed over to the workshop regarding Text Analytics and saw two clever talks in regards to steering which is, to let your data mining algorithm provide the first level of organization, but then allow the user to drag, group or otherwise cluster similar types as they see fit. Both talks discussed the importance of these types of features in terms of text analysis and both approach the problem with some-what similar ideas. For more information on these topics, Wednesday morning there will be a talk titled, Observation-level Interaction with Statistical Models for Visual Analytics, and I very much so looking forward to this talk. In general the idea is to let the user group things they deem similar. Next, the clustering algorithms, will check which dimensions have similar values and weight them more and features of dissimilar value will receive lower weights. Which then allows the user to steer the visualization to group data points they deemed as relevant to one another.

The speakers each provided their own example of this type of implementation, one of which was a height map of related topics and the other a spring-layout algorithm for graphs, where users could “pin” selected topics to specific locations and the other non-annotated nodes would adjust their positions accordingly. In addition users could add their annotations as notes, and keywords from those notes would also be considered in the weighting of the spring-layout. A short video displayed the quality and evidence of the effectiveness of this type of approach for steering graph-layouts.

Conclusions:

All in all a great day at the VisWeek Conference, I am really glad I made the decision to come and beginning to think I have found my home in the field of scientific research. I hope I can make some wonderful discoveries and contributions to the community.